The use of what are referred to as Manufacturing Execution Systems. (MES) for automating production and manufacturing processes is known from “Software für die Automatisierung—Transparenz über die Abläufe schaffen” (“Software for automation—Creating transparency across processes), an article by Dirk Kozian in Elektronik für die Automatisierung 11 , Nov. 17, 1999 . These systems integrate the automation level (Controls) with the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems of the enterprise management level. Manufacturing execution systems are systems which, for example, provide information for the optimization of production sequences or handle the coordination or optimization of the production processes. On the one hand the manufacturing execution systems must supplement the general planning data of the ERP systems by including system-specific and current detailed planning data and forward this accordingly to the subordinate automation level. On the other hand they have the task of accepting production-related information from the automation level, editing this information and passing it on to the enterprise management level. One of the tasks fulfilled by MES systems is thus to implement vertical integration between the enterprise resource planning level and the automation level. Typical individual tasks of MES systems are enterprise asset management, maintenance management, information management, scheduling, dispatching and trace and tracking. Each of these tasks is executed by MES components or, as the case may be, MES applications.
In the classical programming languages (e.g. Pascal or Fortran) that were used for producing software in the eighties, data and functions were kept separate. It was not until the object-oriented programming paradigm became established that data and functions were combined to form objects. In the nineties, isolated attempts were made to assign meta data to the objects. Meta data is information about other information, for example information about existing objects themselves. This meta data is in fact present in the overall system or in the overall context, but it is neither physically stored in an object nor does it contain knowledge about the application to be implemented or about the business process to be implemented.
D. E. Perry and A. A. Wolf introduced the term “architectural style” in “Foundations for the Study of Software Architecture”, ACM SIGSOFT, Software Engineering Notes, Vol. 17, No. 4 . pp. 40-52 , October 1992 . In this publication reference is made inter alia to the consequences and influences of an architecture on an application based on that architecture. However, it does not describe how advantages in terms of the production, configuration, reorganization or modifiability of software applications can be achieved through the targeted use of meta information in a software architecture.